President Obama is continuing to support European leaders’ decision to engage in more diplomatic dealings with Russia, frustrating a growing chorus in Washington calling for an infusion of arms to Ukraine.
In the middle of a day of meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama told reporters that he supports continued diplomatic talks this week between Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Putin — even as the president acknowledged that sanctions and diplomatic efforts have not deterred Putin’s aggression in Ukraine so far.
“My hope is that through these diplomatic efforts, those costs have become high enough that Mr. Putin’s preferred option is for a diplomatic resolution,” he said. “And I won’t prejudge whether or not they’ll be successful.”
If the talks fail, he said he would consider sending lethal aid to Ukraine but only for defensive purposes, and urged patience for those pushing for a tougher stand against Putin.
“There’s not going to be any specific point at which I say, ‘ah, clearly lethal defensive weapons would be appropriate here,’” he said. “It is our ongoing analysis of what can we do to dissuade Russia from encroaching further and further on Ukrainian territory. Our hope is, is that that’s done through diplomatic means.”
By merely raising the prospects of sending weapons to Ukraine, Obama and Merkel were playing a bit of a bad-cop, good-cop game.
The German economy is closely tied to that of Russia, and Merkel’s comments Monday made it clear she has ruled out providing lethal aid and would consider additional sanctions only if talks ultimately fail.
“I, myself, actually would not be able to live with not having made this attempt” to negotiate a cease-fire, Merkel said.
But she was quick to say that if the U.S. decides to send weapons, it wouldn’t weaken U.S. and European resolve to stop Russia from further violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
“There may be some areas where there are tactical disagreements — there may not be,” she said. “But the broad principle that we have to stand up for not just Ukraine, but the principle of territorial integrity and sovereignty, is one where we are completely unified.”
Despite Europe’s hesitancy, there’s a growing shift in Washington — amid the think-tank world and on Capitol Hill — that arming Ukraine may be the best way to help bring the crisis to a peaceful end.
The Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council and the Center for a New American Security released a white paper last week arguing that, while risky, providing lethal aid to Ukraine could be the best way to force Putin to rethink his continued aggression.
Over the weekend, Brookings’ president, Strobe Talbott, expressed very little faith in the Merkel-Hollande talks with Putin.
“A doomed peace process: Merkel-Hollande rely on real diplomacy not backed by force while #Putin relies on real force w/ talks as smokescreen,” he tweeted.
And last week, several Democratic and Republican members of Congress also joined forces to call on Obama to send weapons to Kiev amid a growing restlessness about the failure to stop Putin from continuing to escalate the crisis.
Ukrainian, Russian, French and German leaders are set to meet again Wednesday in Minsk, the site of the broken cease-fire of Sept. 5. The key sticking point in the negotiations appears to be Ukrainian demands that the line of demarcation agreed upon in September remain while the Russian-supported separatists want a new line to include hundreds of square kilometers that insurgents have seized over the past five months.
Experts on Russia relations remain skeptical that the next round of negotiations will be successful.
“Even if they are, I don’t expect it to hold for a very long period of time,” said Andrew Kuchins, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
While Obama’s drumbeat of support for Ukraine and the threat of sending weapons is useful for leverage in the negotiations with Putin this week, ultimately Kuchins argues that the U.S. needs to up the ante to effectively stand up to Moscow.
“I was supportive of lethal military assistance on Feb. 28” of last year, Kuchins said. “I knew if Putin didn’t have a sense that it was going to have real costs for him, he would not stop. We lost Crimea to him, but let’s not lose eastern Ukraine.”
Putin, Kuchin said, could very well escalate in response and send more troops and put more of eastern Ukraine in play, but that would only harden the resolve of Europeans and the U.S. on sanctions — and possibly sending arms.
As civilian casualties continue to multiply in Ukraine, critics of Obama’s foreign policy on Capitol Hill are growing increasingly impatient.
“President Obama’s continued weakness in the face of aggression is making the world a more dangerous place,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a statement Monday.
“The Ukrainian people do not have time for President Obama’s ‘strategic patience,’” he continued. “It is time for President Obama to quit equivocating and quickly provide Ukraine the defensive weapons it needs.”
